Monday, October 08, 2007

October, with Hallowe'en heralding the onset of wintry weather, is perhaps the "scariest" month of the year. For me, though, it was last month, September, because we gave everyone all the capabilities of Newsletter Edition (ok, nothing scary there; quite the reverse in fact). No, the scary part was starting the process of updating the FeedBlitz business model to one that was ad-based for our non-paying customers.

As it turns out, with this change, FeedBlitz introduced the first significant ad-funded email newsletter service. Ever.

Anyway, I'm pleased to say that everyone is now enjoying the new features we made available with this move, which is one of several ad-related changes we're making. What's next, you may well ask?

Well, for a start, we promised revenue sharing. And revenue sharing will be delivered by the new (opt-in) email advertising platform we're now beta testing. If you get this newsletter via email you'll see at least one ad embedded in this article; other readers may preview it online here. There's a lot more to be said about this exciting program, and I'm going to save that for one or more posts later this week.

Just to whet your appetite, though, with this new technology, everyone will have the chance to opt in to this ad program (it will be optional) and monetize their mailing lists. And everyone will also have the chance to advertise their blog, book, business or service in FeedBlitz-powered email newsletters.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. What happened after the ad-based service appeared? Here are September's metrics:

Although site traffic was up, mailing volume was still down somewhat in September over August. Problem? Doesn't appear so - just looks like one of those things, a blip of sorts. October's mailing metrics are nicely up: the peak October day so far (October 4th) sent 1,198,503 messages, up nearly 18% on September's best effort.

Finally, we have had some database performanceproblems recently that we're working hard to minimize. I'm glad to say that the new server has arrived - it's quite the beast - and will be brought online this week, all other things being equal. There will be some downtime when we fire it up into production service, so expect to see a note here about that as and when.

So with that out of the way, think about whether you'd like to be part of the beta for our revenue-sharing email ad program. Mail me if you'd like to be in!